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Autobiography/Memoir One of the Family: Why A Dog Called Maxwell Changed My Life Nicky Campbell 2021 Nicky Campbell was born Nicolas Andrew Argyl Campbell in 1961. He was born in Edinburgh and adopted when he was four days old. Now a radio and television presenter and a journalist, Nicky Campbell began his career writing jingles. In 2004, Nicky Campbell wrote Blued Eye Son about his experience of being adopted. He has won numerous awards, including being appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2015. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Twelve Years a Slave Solomon Northup 1853 Twelve Years a Slave is an 1853 memoir and slave narrative by American Solomon Northup as told to and written by David Wilson. Solomon Northup was a free Black resident of New York State who was drugged on a trip to Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1841 and sold to a dealer of enslaved people. Beaten and chained, he was transported by ship to a New Orleans market and suffered more than a decade of servitude on Louisiana plantations. Northup had to hide his literacy or risk violence. And he was unable, for years, to get word to anyone in the North to let them know where he was. Fortunately, he was eventually able to send messages which prompted legal action that secured his freedom. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother, John Lennon Julia Baird 2008 Julia Baird, sister of John Lennon writes that until now, the true story of John Lennon's childhood has never been told. Julia has herself been on a personal journey that has made it possible only now to reveal the full extent of the pain and difficulties - as well as the happier times - living inside John Lennon's family brought. Julia reveals the various strong, self-willed and selfish women who surrounded John as he grew up. John was removed from his mother at the age of 5 to live with his Aunt Mimi, and here Julia shows for the first time the cruelty of this decision - to both mother and son, she sheds a new light on his upbringing with Mimi which is often at dramatic odds with the accepted tale. John's frequent visits to his mother and sisters gave him the liveliness, freedom and love he sought and allowed him to develop his musical talents. The tragic death of their mother, knocked down outside Aunt Mimi's house by a speeding car when John was 17, meant that life for him and his sisters would never be the same again. Poignant, raw and beautifully written, Imagine This casts John Lennon's life in a new light and reveals the source of his emotional fragility and musical genius. It is also one family's extraordinary story of how it dealt with fame and tragedy beyond all imagining. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Our Voice of Fire Brandi Morin 2022 In her book, award-winning journalist, Brandi Morin, interweaves stories from her career (such as visiting relatives of murdered First Nations grils) with her story of growing up in foster care, witnessing intergenerational trauma, and her career as a journalist. "She chose to reveal her past as a survivor to inspire others and show that they're not alone" says Kelly Boutsalis in her review for Canadian magazine Quill & Quire. External Website

Academic Articles Surviving the "House of a Hundred Windows": Irish Industrial Schools in Recent Fiction and Memoirs Michael Molino 2001 The story of industrial schools in Ireland is, then, a history of intersecting tendencies. On the one hand, initially well-intended educational and religious beliefs and practices gave way to a self-protecting system where abuse was tolerated and abusers protected. On the other hand, the stories of child abuse, often told by adults later in life, reflect a different trajectory—from a topic discussed, if at all, only in euphemistic and muted terms to an incendiary issue where guilt is often immediately assumed. This paradoxical history, with all its ambivalent attitudes, has been pointedly revealed in recent fiction and memoirs, where the stories of children sent to industrial schools are given voice and the horrors of institutional life exposed. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Scent of my Mother's Kiss Melene Fawdry 2015 Originally published in 2007 as The Little Mongrel - free to a good home, The Scent of my Mother’s Kiss includes a new chapter on Rock Lynn House, a Salvation Army Maternity Home in West Launceston that operated between 1900 and 1960. This book has been written from the perspective of an adoptee, tracing her formative years from the blank slate of birth to the verge of adulthood and the relentless search for the key that would erase the debilitating fugue of not knowing. The child who is placed with adoptive parents soon after birth is denied the experience of the biological sequence that begins in the womb, the merging of the physiological with the psychological that forms the post-partum bond. The resultant collision between the needs of the adoptive parent and adoptee has the capacity to magnify the pain for each and shatter the illusion irrevocably. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Navigating My Way to a Bachelor of Arts Degree in the 1960s: A Care Leaver's Journey Karen Laura-Lee Wilson 2015 Karen was 7 years old when she was dropped off by her mother to an orphanage in Brisbane, Queensland. She wasn't there for long but the negative impact has been life long. Karen was awarded a scholarship to attend university in 1960; university wasn't easy by she persisted and by 1969 was a qualified librarian. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Born To Survive: You Can't Break A Broken heart Kylie-Anne Evans 2020 Kylie-Anne Evans writes: "My name is Kylie-Anne Evans, and it's time to tell my story as the truth will set me free. I am a survivor. I am a victim of incest. I became pregnant after rape and lost my daughter when I was 15. I suffered domestic violence. Depression stalked me. I attempted suicide. I lost people I loved to suicide, natural causes and murder. And I lost my sons. I could not look after myself, much less my children. My life was not worth living.I survived. More than that – I lived. I found resilience. I fought my way back. I overcame. And I became me – a mother with wonderful children and an amazing life." External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Other Side of Absence Betty O'Neil 2020 Betty O'Neil grew up during the 1950s in country NSW with her single mother, Nora. Because Nora worked in hotels, in life-in positions - Betty was often in foster care with local families. Betty didn't know her father as a child; Antoni deserted Nora before Betty was born. Decades later Nora travels to Lublin in Poland to found out about him and his role in the Polish resistance and his time in concentration camps. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Inside Out: An Autobiography Adamson Robert 2004 Inside Out is a story about survival and taking risks, about seizing the moment and living with the consequences, about the adventure of being alive. IRobert Adamson tells the story of his childhood and early adulthood in fifties and sixties Australia/ He then spends much of his adolescence in and out of boys' homes and later prisons. In between stints inside he works as a pastrycook and becomes besotted with the sultry, dark-haired Carol. Together they take off on a wild road trip to Queensland - a journey that could only ever have one ending. But prison has its own destiny for young Robert. It introduces this sensitive, responsive young man to the debating society, to books, and to a love affair with words. It sets alight Adamson's imagination and fosters his dream of becoming a writer. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Foundling (2018) Paul Joseph Fronczak 2018 The Foundling by Paul Joseph Fronczak is an incredible true story. In 1964 a newborn was stolen from a Chicago hospital. Two years after the kidnapping a toddler turns up in Newark, New Jersey and everone decides that child is the missing Chicago baby, Paul Fronczak. But it's not Paul, and much of Paul’s book is about the investigation he undertakes to find out who his biological parents are. https://www.foundlingpaul.com/ External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Left unsaid: a triumph of sibling love over parental neglect & institutional care Margo O'Byrne 2009 The journal of Margo O'Bynre from life in an orphanage in Queensland to community development work in Western Australia. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles 12 Best Movies About Orphans Biplab Mazumder 2018 There are a plethora of films about children and family relationship. But how many out there deals with Orphans? Here’s a list of movies you can put on your must watch list. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir You Don't Look Adopted Anne Heffron 2016 Writing this memoir of being adopted was crucial for Anne Heffron; she felt she needed to tell this story in order to save her life. Adopted as a baby, Heffron describes the deep fear that, in the end, everyone will abandon her, just as her mother did. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano ( Olaudah Equiano 1789 Olaudah Equiano (/əˈlaʊdə/; c. 1745 – 31 March 1797), known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa, he was a writer and abolitionist from, according to his memoir, the Eboe (Igbo) region of the Kingdom of Benin (today southern Nigeria). Enslaved as a child in Africa, he was taken to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but purchased his freedom in 1766. As a freedman in London, Equiano supported the British abolitionist movement. He was part of the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group composed of Africans living in Britain, and he was active among leaders of the anti-slave trade movement in the 1780s. He published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which depicted the horrors of slavery. It went through nine editions in his lifetime and helped gain passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade. Equiano married an English woman, Susannah Cullen, in 1792 and they had two daughters. He died in 1797 in Westminster. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People The Berlin Shadow Jonathan Lichtenstein 2020 In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein’s father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. As Hans enters old age, he and his son Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin. Published to coincide with the eightieth anniversary, this is a highly compelling account of a father and son’s attempt to emerge from the shadows of history. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Just Like a Family? Writing to Heal—The Emergence of Foster Care in Literature'. Michell et al. 2018 ​Authors: Musgrove, Nell, Michell, Deidre. This book draws on archival, oral history and public policy sources to tell a history of foster care in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. It is, primarily, a social history which places the voices of people directly touched by foster care at the centre of the story, but also within the wider social and political debates which have shaped foster care across more than a century. The book confronts foster care’s difficult past—death and abuse of foster children, family separation, and a general public apathy towards these issues—but it also acknowledges the resilience of people who have survived a childhood in foster care, and the challenges faced by those who have worked hard to provide good foster homes and to make child welfare systems better. These are themes which the book examines from an Australian perspective, but which often resonate with foster care globally. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Truth about My Fathers Gaby Naher 2002 Though she may have entered the world alone, Gaby Naher was destined to know the most genuine, heartfelt fathering a girl could hope for through her adoptive father, her beloved Daddo. Yet still she had never seen her features reflected in anothter person's face and so, in her 20s, she went in search of her biological father. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Finding Fish: A Memoir Antwone Q Rivas Fisher et al. 2001 Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his mid-teens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Wards of the state: An autobiographical novella Robert Adamson 1992 During his teenage years, the author was often in trouble with the police and sent to jail. The book looks at the safety of the poet's homelife on the Hawkesbury in NSW. External Website